Hello, fellow dog trainers. I'm Hannah Branigan, and you are listening to Drinking from the Toilet,

a podcast that goes behind the scenes

into the real world of dog training.

Do you spend as much time on the internet arguing with people about dog training as I do?

I hope not.

We wouldn't be very productive as a community if everybody else did too.

And I know we really shouldn't.

But recently, even though I know better,

I engaged in such an argument

with people who were wrong on the internet

on the subject of shaping as a training technique.

I assume my lack of restraint

was the effect of some sort of trigger stacking

or redirected aggression,

but that's a topic for another podcast.

Still, shaping is an element of training that I feel passionately about, as opposed to other areas of training and behavior

where I also feel passionately about. But before I talk about shaping, what does that even mean?

In the most basic sense, shaping means simply reinforcing successive approximations.

Okay, that's not that helpful, so even more plainly, reinforcing a series of changes in behavior

that are steps towards the goal behavior, which of course makes complete sense.

With humans, we can just give a set of simple instructions to explain

the goal behavior and the learner just does it, right? Ha! Not so simple. I can know perfectly well

...